Come on, give me the chills

Thoughts about changing, life, and whatever comes to mind.

Author: Andrea Grassi

  • terror as a teaching skill

    How do you react when you’re pissed off of something that’s happening?

    Maybe the natural reaction you have is to yell at someone who’s not even responsible for that.
    This is what I saw today, but it’s not just this.

    It made me realize that from time to time we use fear and terror as a way to discipline others, even though those people didn’t require so much violence to begin with.

    Reacting with anger it’s natural, it’s because of the difficulty to keep calm and carry on that we react this way, but yet I think of it as a way to measure how you handle problems.

    Terror shouldn’t be used to constraint people or to control them.
    Terror and fear don’t empower people, they deprive them of their creativity that’s why it’s so hard to have a nice working business afterall.

    But what is the alternative?
    I always ask this question every time.
    What is the alternative to force your way through terror?

    The alternative takes more time, and it requires you to also learn how to manage your emotions.
    Because you shouldn’t be angry with innocent people and neither you should communicate with rage.
    It also requires you to learn how to communicate and empower people and lastly… it requires you to accept some failures.

    Thinking about it like this clearly marks the difference. The shortcut is to use rage to get to the point.
    But the real solution, the one that sticks and improves everyone, is much harder.

  • january 2015 monthly checkup

    This month was quite interesting, although I missed 1 day, I continuously wrote on the blog.
    One thing I noted though was that the quality of what I was writing was a bit off, probably because I was always hasty in writing, so in the end I couldn’t always have a clear view on what I was doing, therefore I slacked.

    In this month I eventually finished my blog post on how to setup a fast wordpress blog.
    It didn’t get that much traction (not comparable to the Node.JS post on how to move away from heroku). But I was happy to close that chapter.

    Post that I loved writing this month were

    Looking back at these posts right now made me realize that, after all, I got some good posts out of it anyway, but they didn’t stick to me. That’s strange because some of them resonated with me deeply but in the end I got the impression that it wasn’t a good month.

    Maybe I’m overreacting, or maybe I started to slack on the end of the month.
    Who know, but the whole point of writing these posts at the beginning of the month is to grasp how it’s going.

    So yes, today is sunny and it’s a wonderful day.

  • the things you don’t know

    In every job there are things you don’t know, part of the experience that transform into an expert derives from that information.

    The things you don’t know.

    Those things are also the one you forget because now you automatically use them, but at first they were unknown to you. They were the first building blocks of your knowledge.

  • less services

    Today I started migrating part of the things I’ve had on SimpleNote/Quip/Evernote to OneNote and iOS Notes.

    It’s strange because I wasn’t a fan of microsoft services, but OneNote is well done, works good, and even though the Typography is not the best in the class, it has the feature needed.

    This also led me to realize one thing:
    We have too many services.

    I know that a service that does “one thing and does it well” is perfect, and I love the idea, but what about note taking?
    We only need notes, sharing, and a bit of typography.

    It shouldn’t be that hard, but instead we are flooded with new services that, guess what, promise us to save more time, improve our productivity and so on.
    The truth is that learning has a cost, and sometimes sticking to the old and simple solution is enough for you to be effective.

    Think of “how much improvement will I gain from this?”
    If a change of service will save an hour a day for you, then by all means go and use it right now, but if that’s not the case then you should pause a bit and reflect if this move is needed or not.

  • what stops you from achieving?

    Today I was with a group of friends that work together in a company.
    They’re a very supportive team and work closely together to accomplish projects.

    Each of them has his/her own unique skills, but what drove them mad was the fact that some basic tasks didn’t end so fast.
    They took way more time than the usual.

    Why that happened?
    We talked a bit and two things clearly emerged as possible culprit about this.

    The first was: Who’s in charge?

    Even in democracy we need one people to take the lead, even if not in every decision it’s important to have a person in charge of the task. Not doing it but coordinating it.

    The second was: When to do it?

    When you don’t have a deadline you procrastinate and it’s hard to feel the pressure to complete the task.

    Even though these two things aren’t a requirement for the completion of a task they surely are an important part of it.